A Canberra father claims his son was met with laughter after complaining to a Basketball ACT referee of racist abuse on court, attacking him for his Indigenous background.

Key points:

Richie Allan alleges repeated on-court racism has been levelled against his son

Mr Allan says his son "got a laugh" when he complained about the abuse to referees

Basketball ACT says it is investigating and will 'deal with it appropriately'

Richie Allan said his 22-year-old son Richard had faced on-court racism at several games, and had written a letter to the organisation complaining of racist behaviour months ago, but had not received a response.

Mr Allan senior said Richard had been called a "dirty abo" and a "petrol sniffer" on the court, and that the racist abuse had escalated in recent weeks. He said abuse on Monday night prompted them to go public.

"He did complain to Basketball ACT about it, and he actually complained to the umpires first, and when he explained what happened to the umpires, all he got was a laugh.

"They're supposed to be the officials of basketball."

However Basketball ACT chief executive Matt Dunstan, who has been in the job for a matter of weeks, said he had not been made aware of the complaint until Mr Allan tweeted about it earlier this week.

"To date, we don't have a report on this incident, we were not aware of it, the only thing we've seen is what's come up on Twitter," he said.

"We have no records of an email coming through or a report coming through, so we'll certainly do more investigating with that and that's certainly something we'll discuss with the family when we get the chance to do it."

Mr Dunstan said if anything had happened it would be "dealt with appropriately".

"I was horrified. We don't have a place for racism in our sport or organisation. To feel that someone felt that way when the came in to our competition, our organisation was really disappointing," he said.